Germany

Andreas Reif

Andreas Reif is the vice-chair of the IMpACT group. Personal profile: I started to work in clinical psychiatry in 2000 and developed a deep interest in the molecular foundation of human behavior and related disorders. Since then, I continued to work in clinical psychiatry as well as psychiatric research. Currently, I am the Chair of Psychiatry at the University Hospital Frankfurt, Goethe University Frankfurt am Main.

Research profile: The Reif lab, comprising psychiatrists, psychologists and biologists, focuses on the neurobiology of ADHD, anxiety disorders, and bipolar disorders. To do so, we employ different yet converging methods following the rationale of translational psychiatry: cell culture experiments, molecular biology, animal behavioral studies, and research involving human patients such as neuroimaging and neuropsychology. Genetic and biomarker approaches bridge the latter studies with basic neurobiology. Amongst our candidate molecules, nitric oxide synthase (NOS-I) and DIRAS2 are central but not exclusive.

Klaus-Peter Lesch

Klaus-Peter Lesch, MD, is Associate Professor at the Department of Neuroscience, MHeNS at Maastricht University, Professor of Molecular Psychiatry at the University of Wuerzburg, Germany, and Visiting Professor at the Department of Psychology, University of Tartu, Estonia. He underwent training as a clinical psychiatrist at the University of Wuerzburg during which he was awarded a Research Fellowship at the National Institute of Mental Health, NIH, Bethesda, USA. His research is focussed on the molecular neurobiology of cognitive control and self-regulation, epigenetics of brain development and neuronal plasticity, imaging genetics, animal models of attention, cognition, and learning/memory as well as pathogenetic mechanisms of depression, attention-deficit/hyperactivity (ADHD), substance use and co-morbid disorders. He is the coordinator of the Clinical Research Unit on ADHD, co-director of the DFG Graduate Programme GRK 1253 and founding member of the International Graduate School of Life Sciences (GSLS). The total funding obtained up until 2014 was more than 11 Mio Euros from various funding agencies including EU, DFG, BMBF, Thyssen.

Researchers Germany

Grimm Oliver

Oliver Grimm is an attending psychiatrist at the University Clinic Frankfurt, Department of Psychiatry, Psychosomatics. He finished his medical studies at the University of Würzburg, Germany and continued his psychiatric residency at the Central Institute for Mental Health where he worked as a post-doc in the neuroimaging group of Prof. Meyer-Lindenberg and in the neuropsychology department of Prof. Flor. He became interested in the evaluation of the reward system and the striatum in psychiatric disease with neuroimaging. Apart from some work on imaging genetics, he supervised studies exploring the effect of experimental drugs in healthy volunteers via neuroimaging (e.g. ketamine, cannabidiol) and participated in the ENIGMA metaanalysis. He joined the psychiatric university clinic in Zürich, Switzerland where he lead a ward specialized in treatment of mania and related acute psychoses. He continued by joining the University clinic Frankfurt and has since then been working with Prof. Reif as part of the CoCA project where he his investigating pharmaco-fMRI and the reward system of ADHD and comorbid disorders. He is currently the supervising psychiatrist for the ADHD outpatient clinic.

Freudenberg Florian

I am a postdoctoral researcher in the laboratory of Andreas Reif. Here I am working on the functional role of neuronal nitric oxide and its interaction with the glutamatergic postsynapse in psychiatric disorders, such as schizophrenia and affective and impulsive disorders. Moreover, in the framework of the AGGRESSOTYPE consortium I am studying the molecular and genomic mechanisms of aggression and impulsivity in mice. Throughout my research career I was interested in the molecular and circuit mechanisms involved in the development of psychiatric disorders. I received my diploma (Master) in biology from the University of Bremen in 2005. After finishing my grad studies in the Peter Seeburg's lab, I received my PhD-degree from the University of Heidelberg in 2009. Before joining Andreas Reif's research group in 2012, I was a postdoctoral researcher in Tansu Celikel's lab at the University of Southern California, funded by the Feodor Lynen Fellowship from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.

Heike Weber

My name is Heike Weber and I´m working since 2009 as a postdoctoral researcher in the group of Andreas Reif (Department of Psychiatry, University of Frankfurt). In addition to the administration and curation of the German ADHD database, my research is mainly focused on the molecular genetic basis of ADHD, affective and anxiety disorders. More specifically, I compare the genomic variability between patients suffering from a psychiatric illness and healthy individuals on a candidate gene and genome-wide level. In order to elucidate the influence of detected risk alleles on the development of psychiatric disorders, I use specific bioinformatical tools to predict the potential impact of risk alleles on gene expression and alternative splicing.

Kittel Sarah

Sarah Kittel-Schneider is currently working as a resident physician at the Department of Psychiatry, Psychosomatics and Psychotherapy, University of Würzburg, Germany and as a postdoctoral researcher in the group of Andreas Reif. Her clinical focus is on bipolar-affective disorder and adult ADHD and here she is also responsible for screening and recruiting patients and healthy controls for research projects. In her own lab work, she is especially interested in cell culture models of aADHD and bipolar disorder and the development of fluid biomarkers for differential diagnostics and treatment response. Her current research project involves the generation of neuronal cells from fibroblast-derived induced pluripotent stem cells to functionally characterize risk gene variants of bipolar disorder and adult ADHD.

Schiele Miriam

My name is Miriam Schiele, and I am currently working as a PhD student at the University of Würzburg within the framework of the SFB TRR 58 "Fear, Anxiety, Anxiety Disorders". Our research focuses on gene x environment interactions underlying fear and anxiety, as well as their impact on fear conditioning and generalisation processes. Aside from pathogenic mechanisms of anxiety, I am particularly interested in identifying factors associated with resilience. Additionally, I am also interested in investigating emotional processing and attentional biases in bipolar disorder.

Weißflog Lena

I studied biology at the universities of Karlsruhe and Würzburg in Germany. In 2008 I started working on my PhD thesis entitled "Molecular genetics of emotional dysregulation in ADHD" in the group of Prof. Klaus-Peter Lesch. During that time I was responsible for the SNP genotyping of the DNA samples collected by the IMpACT consortium for candidate gene based association studies. Since 2011 I am a post doctoral researcher in the group of Prof. Andreas Reif. My main interest is the function of candidate genes like DIRAS2 and DGKH and their role in the pathomechanisms of ADHD.